Next up: Aik Siong Koh with a talk about 3D CAD and Motion Simulation. The motivation driving him is that UIs in general seem to be moving in this direction (virtual reality games, Croquet, Second Life). Why Smalltalk? CADSM is very complex - Smalltalk is time tested and simpler. VisualWorks gives him platform independence.

What is freeCAD?

• Basic 3D CAD with advanced motion simulation
• Imports DXF (AutoCAD) and STEP (ISO Standard format) files

You can grab this stuff at askoh.com. Cool - he tried running this stuff on the OLPC an hour ago, and freeCAD worked - meaning, VW works there :)

Looks like the rest is a demo, so your best bet is to download it and try it yourself. The math problems are gbeing solved using StMath, which is part of the overall package (you can get that in the public store). Future work?

• Improve GUI and Solid Modeling
• Port to Squeak and Croquet
• Port to OLPC
• Motion add-ons for other CADs
• Control robots and CNC machines
• Finite Element Analysis
• Computational Fluid Dynamics
• System simulation (Modelica)

He's looking for volunteers to help out :)

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